The Queen Needs No Advocate

http://youtu.be/h2N_OMp3T8I

In my career, I've been fortunate to spend a great deal of time involved in system design.  Much of that time has been spent implementing or modifying established systems (e.g. Dungeons & Dragons and Fallout's SPECIAL system).  Before I was employed in the industry, I spent a lot of time developing my own tabletop systems and modifying the systems of others, so this has always been something I've enjoyed doing.

There are many pitfalls to system design and I believe most designers trip those pitfalls by moving into implementation details too quickly.  I believe some keys to success in system design (and for design in general) are to establish clear goals, to frame what those goals will accomplish in terms of player experience, and to continually return to those goals and player experiences to ensure that nothing was lost in the details of implementation.

I believe the most well-executed systems are ones where thoughtful players can accurately discern the designers' goals simply by scrutinizing the systems in action.  Though not all players need to be able to do this, the ones who care to do so should be able to.  Designers who succeed in creating systems that can be "reverse-engineered" in such a way have captured the soul of elegance in design.

I sometimes look to traditional games for mechanical inspiration.  One of the ones I think of most often is chess.  Clocking in at over 1,000 years of play around the world, chess has had a lot of iteration time.  I'm not an expert on chess strategy and I'm not a particularly good player, but I know chess well enough to take some simple lessons away from it.  Two that I often rely on are lessons of obvious value and orthogonally equivalent value.  These two lessons can be summarized by examing three chess pieces: the queen, the knight, and the bishop.

When I look at any system, I examine both the system's design as well as the content that uses the system.  I believe this is something that system designers should always do.  A system is only as good as the content that makes use of it; content that fails to make use of a system (or vice versa) will always create a disappointing experience.

The queen is typically the most powerful piece in chess (though not the most valuable; that role is reserved for the king).  The queen's movement capabilities combine the lateral movement of the rook with the diagonal movement of the bishop.  Even if you are learning chess for the first time, the fact that the queen combines the movement of two other pieces makes her relative power clear.  A rook's ability to perform a castle, the knight's excellence at creating forks, and a the pawn's ability to capture an enemy pawn en passant are all capabilities that take a while for players to appreciate, but not the queen's movement.  The queen's value is obvious.

Gameplay consists of players making (more-or-less) informed decisions about what they need to do to overcome an obstacle.  It is not enough for the obstacle to be clearly defined and communicated to players.  They also need to have a clear understanding of what tools are at their disposal to solve the problem.  In chess, the player's primary tools are his or her pieces.  Though circumstances determine the value of pieces on any given move, no one needs to advocate the fundamental value of the queen in chess.

As an extreme analogue in video games, it's unlikely that many players need to be told what the value of the HECU RPG is the first time they find one in Half-Life.  After being pursued by a relentless Apache helicopter over numerous maps, the player winds up in a cave with the RPG on the ground and the Apache hovering outside.  Players typically snatch up the RPG and blast the Apache in moments.  Though the HECU is not the "queen" of Half-Life's weapons, it has obvious applicability in the circumstance where it appears.

When designers develop tools, we should strive for clarity of primary purpose in a player's tools.  The more obvious we make the value of the tools at a player's disposal, the more quickly the player will spend time fully engaged with the obstacles at hand instead of trying to figure out what they aren't "getting".

Chess has various informal ranking systems for the relative value of pieces.  The rankings are not used for scoring, but they are used to give players a rough idea of the strategic (not tactical) value of those pieces.  In the most commonly used system, pawns have a value of 1, rooks have a value of 5, and queens have a value of 9.  Knights and bishops are both rated at 3.  Bishops move diagonally, always staying on their starting color, and knights are the "funny moving" pieces of chess, hopping two squares horizontally or vertically and one square vertically or horizontally, passing over other pieces along the way.  Though their tactical applications in any given circumstance are completely dissimilar, the common ranking systems give them equal (or close to equal) strategic value in chess.

Whether chess' numerous contributors intended for them to be equal in value by design or players collectively determined they were equal in value, today's players generally regard them as being so in spite of their radical differences.  I.e., players treat them as having orthogonally equivalent value.  Knights and bishops are considered equivalent in an orthogonal sense because their mechanics and applications do not overlap but they commonly create the same amount of benefit for players.  Though bishops can move infinitely along their color, potentially from corner to corner, they lack the knight's ability to move over pieces.

Dungeons & Dragons commonly presents choices in such a fashion.  The most obvious examples are spells, which are grouped by level.  In most editions of A/D&D, haste and fireball are 3rd level wizard/magic-user/sorcerer spells.  Though the tactical relevance and application of these spells varies wildly, the games' designers established them as being equal.

When we design tools for the player to use -- abilities, gear, options, upgrades -- options with ostensibly orthogonally equivalent value create interesting choices for the player.  They also lend themselves to increased clarify of purpose.  The more tools overlap in function, the less obvious it is to players why a given tool exists.  The less tools overlap in function, the more those tools seem suited to a specific circumstance.

While these are high-level design concepts, creating choices with obvious, easily differentiated values can make the low-level details much easier to execute and build upon.  When a player is presented with strategic or tactical choices, he or she is always fundamentally asking the question, "Why do I want to make this choice instead of any of the others?"  As designers, we want to communicate the answers to their questions as elegantly as possible.  Ideally, the design of the player's tools and the game's content should be self-advocating, allowing players to reverse-engineer our intent and their range of choices without a word of explanation.

the black hound - what its deal was

In the course of following our countdown over at Obsidian, a lot of gamers have been discussing past IPs we've worked with. One of the common subjects is The Black Hound, a project some of us at OEI worked on at Black Isle. It's also something I worked on as a NWN2 mod in my spare time. There's a Wikipedia entry for it and a few lore sites kicking around. Some of the info on it is accurate and some isn't, but I think the details are less important than what we were trying to do with it. I can't speak for everyone who was on the project, of course, but TBH was important to me for a lot of reasons.

When I came to Black Isle, the majority of the studio was working on Planescape: Torment. I was the webmaster for that project, but I desperately wanted to work in development as a designer. I had spent a huge amount of personal time in the 90s playing 2nd Edition AD&D in the Forgotten Realms. Working on Icewind Dale was a dream come true. Yeah, the game had a smaller story focus, and yeah, it didn't have companions, and yeah, and was linear and dungeon-focused, but I was making a real AD&D video game in the Forgotten Realms.

Icewind Dale II is the first game I was credited as lead designer on, but I was the lead designer on TBH first. I felt that the Dalelands, bordering on the Moonsea, presented a cool subsection of the Realms and a crossroads of cultures that would be interesting to explore. We could build a personal story, focused on how you fatefully intersected the life of someone hell-bent on doing something crazy. Like many Realms adventures, this wasn't a world-shattering event, but something locally catastrophic, like Moander appearing near a town and devouring a huge swath of the landscape. It's just one of those crazy Realms stories where bands of adventurers and the Cult of the Dragon start throwing fireballs and leveling villages while the townsfolk run for cover.

Some people have suggested that I hate high fantasy or want to subvert high fantasy. Neither of these are really true. I just don't like how most stories handle high fantasy: both too seriously and not seriously enough. Too seriously in the sense that a lot of fantasy conventions are considered so sacred that you can't touch them (or even question them). Not seriously enough in the sense that the scenarios and the characters don't feel like they tackle the obvious questions raised by the settings they're placed in.

As an example, the Red Wizards of Thay (an FR magical organization/magocracy) underwent a transformation between 2nd Ed. and 3E. They became a "kinder, gentler" trading nation forming magical mercantile enclaves in lands that would let them in. The thing is, 2nd Ed./3E Red Wizards probably look pretty weird to Cormyreans and Dalesmen. They shave their heads (including the women), speak a different language, and have a lot of magical tattoos. They're also darker-skinned. After a few centuries of being regarded as pariahs everywhere west of the River Sur, they show up in these places and are doing business -- questionable business -- in broad daylight.

The FR designers did something interesting in shifting their MO between 2nd Ed. and 3E. The not interesting thing to do (IMO) with that shift as a scenario or story designer would be to have a pack of bad guy Thayans in an enclave with the good guy locals saying, "Those darn Thayans are up to something, please help us, heroes." I was intrigued by the idea that a Thayan enclave could contain a "new guard" of diplomatic Red Wizards and an "old guard" of fireball-hurling hardasses who aren't allowed (or are discouraged from going) outside. Some of the new guard genuinely want to mend fences. Others simply want to use it as a way to re-establish safe power centers and observation posts in lands where they previously would have been killed on sight.

The new guard use concealing/lightening makeup, don wigs, and wear "western" clothing to fit in. The old guard chafes at having to conceal their heritage and suffers under the jeers and slurs of locals if they dare to appear in public. The new guard speaks with good and proper "Common" grammar and pronunciation, not stumbling over foreign sounds and linguistic concepts. I thought it would create a more interesting and nuanced relationship between the Thayans, the Dalesman, and those who interacted with them, lending sympathy to the traditionally "villainous" and creating a more agonizing struggle between the sub-factions of the Thayans.

An old evil wizard who strokes his beard and cackles as he unleashes chain lightning on random townsfolk isn't particularly sympathetic. But suppose he were a veteran Red Wizard who watched his fellows succumb over the years in service to the zulkirs and was forced to "step aside" as young diplomats smooth talked their way into trade relationships with their former enemies. He has to endure the insults of locals, hear them mock his clothing, his pronunciation, his skin, his culture. And when he expresses his frustration to his new (younger) "superiors", he's treated like an anachronism, an old artillery cannon left to rust and rot on a forgotten battlefield. That dude may still wind up casting chain lightning on townsfolk, but if we weave a compelling story around him, the player should feel that there's more to him than that.

I've been rambling here a bit but let me get back to the main point: The Black Hound wasn't really *~ sUbVeRsIvE ~* "this ain't your daddy's RPG!" fantasy. It had elven ruins and fire genasi and Ilmaterian paladins and Maztican sorcerers and crypts full of undead -- all the stuff that made the Forgotten Realms the crazy blend of hardass adventurer-heavy, gods-mess-with-things, cults-and-dracoliches-under-this-rock D&D fantasy it always has been. I, and I think we all, just tried to approach the world with open eyes, asking, "Okay, so let's suppose all of this stuff about the Realms is true. What does that really mean for how the people in it live their lives?" It made the world more dark and grim, and sometimes that consideration wound up bucking convention, but we didn't set out to invert fantasy conventions just for the sake of doing it.

I regret that the team wasn't able to complete The Black Hound, and not just because of the time and passion we all invested in it. Some of my best tabletop RPG (and CRPG) memories come out of the Forgotten Realms. Huge, crazy, "how many more Volo's Guides can there be?" Forgotten Realms. I think those scenarios were memorable because the DMs/designers made compelling scenarios and the players gave a damn about each other and what was going on. If you take fantasy for granted, yeah, no one's going to get much out of it. I don't think we took anything for granted. We had an opportunity to make something that celebrated high fantasy without being enslaved by its conventions. In retrospect, there are a bunch of personal design choices I look back on and cringe at, but I don't regret the time I spent on it at all. When you enjoy the process of making something that much, it's hard to consider it time wasted. We had a lot of fun while it lasted.

Art and Appreciation

I grew up in a household where one of my parents was self-employed.  My mother began a career at a magazine publisher when I was young.  Barring a few short stints in the late 70s and 80s when he worked as a full-time employee for various companies, my father has been a freelance sculptor for the entirety of my life.  He has sculpted belt buckles, busts, fountains, seals reading books on benches, giant flamingos, torch-bearing Sauks, lamp posts, Erté-inspired art deco female figurines, the Fonz, and myriad corporate doo-dads.  He also draws and paints.  In our house, there's a painting of me sitting on the steps of our old house in Caledonia, Wisconsin.  On another wall, there's a huge painting of some insane abstract whatever he made long ago.  And on his computer, he uses his Wacom tablet daily to make some of the most bizarre, Boschian, hellish landscapes I've ever seen.

I never really made a distinction between these things as "art" or "not art".  In my mind, I considered all of them to be art.  It never crossed my mind that the commercial pieces were less art than the personal pieces, or that the giant abstracts were more art than the portraits of family members and friends.  Many people attach personal drive and tenacity to artistic merit.  Surrender of drive, surrender of vision, surrender of principle -- that's selling out.  I never associated this with my father because, to be frank, in his professional dealings he's often been stubborn, hot-tempered, and implacable.  It didn't matter if he was working for a school district, the city of Milwaukee, or a self-made billionaire.  If you asked him to make a change that he thought was bad, the response was fast and often not diplomatic.

There is much to be admired in the attitude, if not always the ferocity of the response: the principle, the confidence, the determination.  It says, "I am the artist.  I am the one who makes the decision."  This attitude is not always rewarded, and it is typically not respected by the people who are likely to do the rewarding: the clients.  Throughout my life, I've watched my father sculpt many things for many clients.  I've seen him frustrated and triumphant as our family went through financial ups and downs.  I can't remember a time that I ever went hungry, that I ever felt poor, thanks to my parents, but I could tell that it troubled him.  To me, there was no importance on the labels: "art", "fine art", "commercial art".  The importance was the struggle.  How important is it to satisfy an audience?  Does your work need to have an audience?  Can you make a bad choice and fix it later?  Do you need to communicate something?  Do you need to pay the rent?  Do you give a shit if this person hates your guts?  Does it matter if you lose all future work with this client?  Are you willing to live or die on this one point?

After growing up with a sculptor; working with video game artists, writers, and musicians, for over a decade; and living with a traditional painter for almost as long, I developed a maxim for how I would approach creative work: Do anything you want to do in life. Just don't expect anyone to pay you or respect you for it.

This, to me, is the razor.  It's the distillation of any creative struggle with the audience: is the critical or financial approval of the audience worth making a creative choice you think is inferior?  The audience may change: your co-workers, your boss, your client, your lover, your mother, the critics, the public.  You give different audiences different weight, sometimes capriciously, sometimes rationally.  Different issues may weigh on you more heavily than others.  Sometimes it's easy to let go.  Sometimes it hurts like hell.  Sometimes you won't budge on principle.  Sometimes you won't budge because fuck you, idiot.

We often use art and the authority of the artist (or the author, or the director, etc.) as an abstract shield to justify choices we make contrary to the desires of an audience.  We make a choice, an audience complains, and sometimes -- all too often -- we say, "Sorry, but art."  This is unproductive deflection.  This is an absurd, conversation-ending non-argument.  It is presented as a wall that no criticism can breach.  How is the critic intended to respond?

Someone doesn't like how you portrayed a character.  Someone doesn't like how you ended a story.  Someone doesn't like how you framed your shots.  "Art" as defense is not a response to criticism, it is a hollow rejection of criticism.  It does not encourage dialogue, it does not promote introspection, and it does not (typically) ameliorate the audience's displeasure.  At its worst, such a defense encourages non-topical arguments about the nature of art itself.  These discussions, in which no parties are ever victorious, quickly spiral so far away from the actual point of criticism that they often never return.

When I see this, I ask myself: is this how authors and audiences should interact?  I don't think so.  I think both the author and the audience deserve, and can benefit, more from honest appraisals of why we make the choices we makes.  Stop talking about "art".  Stop talking about "entitlement".  How does casting blame elevate and advance conversation about the work?  This is about questioning our work, our choices, our relationship (or lack thereof) with the audience.

Ultimately, our works are our answers to those questions.  Implicitly, what we give to our audience is indicative of our values.  Everything that follows -- the sales, the reviews, the debates, the revisions, the re-releases -- should be viewed as tools for the authors and audience to reinforce or recalibrate those values for future work.  Unless an author plans on quitting creative endeavors after the next project he or she completes, this process is something all of us will go through for life.

If you want to end a conversation, to cut off communication, it's easy enough to deflect criticism.  Assuming you do make your work for an audience, you probably don't make it for all audiences.  Sometimes, the fuck you, idiot instinct is the right one.  If you don't want that audience to respect you or pay for your work, cut them loose; they're not worth your time and you're not worth theirs.  But most of us can also accept a certain amount of dissatisfaction within our target audience.  We make choices, some members of the audience are dissatisfied, but we still suspect they're the right choices.  For those people, and for the rest of the audience, we have the ability to engage them, to sincerely explain our values and hear theirs.

All people engaged in a life of creative work have to fight battles against their shifting priorities.  We all make trade-offs, one way or another. The more we illuminate the specific twists and turns of our own choices, and the struggles involved in making them, the more everyone can gain from the exchange.

Kickstarter and Fanvestor-Oriented Game Design

I'm really happy to see game developers like Double Fine and inXile making high profile Kickstarter-funded projects.  I think these are great opportunities to give smaller groups of motivated fans niche products that would have difficulty finding publisher or venture capital funding.  Great.  This is why every fan loves it, really.

A semi-rhetorical problem I've seen folks propose is, "How do you deal with fans when they're direct investors in the product's development?  Fans don't know what they want."  Should forum posters define the parameters of a game's systems?  Its story?  Should fans be allowed to design a new ending for a game via crowd-sourcing if a bunch of people are mad about it?  How do you reconcile fans' conflicting interests?

This seems like an odd problem to propose, as though now, suddenly, the wants and needs of a diverse paying audience become problematic because they're kickstarting the game's development.  They're still the endusers; that hasn't changed.  What's removed are random staff members -- production, marketing, PR -- at the publisher shifting the project around in the pitch phase, pre-production, and during development.  Even though we're in the defining moments of this nascent trend, I have to forecast this as purely beneficial for everyone directly involved.

I started my career as a web developer for Black Isle Studios.  I was the moderator for a number of high-traffic message boards.  Facilitating interaction between the developers and community has always been important to me.  You can't make everyone happy, certainly, but you can help the community understand what you're doing -- and why.  When the community gains this understanding, their expectations can be framed in a way that appreciates the process the developers go through.  Not everyone will agree with the decisions developers make, but that's fine -- you can't make everyone happy, whether you're being funded by a publisher or the endusers.  We shouldn't try to.  But we should all try to engage our audience in the spirit of genuine interest, listen to what they have to say, give honest feedback, and formulate an experience that they will enjoy.

Design isn't about asking a client what he or she wants and then doing it, verbatim.  It's not about trying to make everyone happy.  It's about understanding the myriad, often conflicting wants and needs of a defined, diverse audience and developing a product that brings them satisfaction.  Satisfaction can come after shock, after frustration, after disappointment.  These moments of pain and fear don't detract, but add to the richness and enjoyment of the final product.  Like anything worth our love and devotion, the process to achieve it is often a struggle.  The worst we can do is disappoint our fans -- but that's always been the case.  For crowd-funded games, it's just gamers and game-makers.  It may not be the way all games can be (or even should be) made, but I'm so glad it's an option, and I hope that everyone involved embraces the potential for sincere collaboration and feedback it presents to us.

Platonic Forms of the Marginalized

E3 was held this week in Los Angeles.  Among the myriad games shown at the convention was a "reboot" of the Tomb Raider franchise.  In both the CG trailer and gameplay demonstration, the series' central protagonist, Lara Croft, is presented in a fashion that is distinctly different from earlier titles in the series.  Her new appearance is more realistic, her physical and emotional reactions to injury and danger are more fragile, and in general she comes across as more human, less superhuman.

Whether this is a good or bad shift for the franchise, I have seen a sizable amount of gamer (and developer) scrutiny directed at the changes.  The attention goes beyond what is typical for changes to the main character of a franchise (cf. reactions to Dante's redesign in Ninja Theory's DmC) because Lara Croft is a rare thing in video games: a high profile female protagonist.  Because most console gamers are male, most game developers are male, and most game protagonists are male, successful female protagonists draw an inordinate amount of attention.

A good portion of the discussions I've seen have focused on Lara as a representation of women and on how female gamers will react to Lara's new design: her reduced physical strength, her physical brawls with intimidating men groping at her, and virtually everything that could relate to her attractiveness.  Though women make up pretty darn close to half of our world's population, they are still largely under-represented in games and in the online gamer community.  This marginalization, whether actively caused or passively continued, means that many people will hold individuals of the marginalized group up as representatives of that group.  Not many people debate Marcus Fenix's value as a representative of Caucasian male protagonists in video games because he's one of hundreds that cover a range including Guybrush Threepwood, Mario, Alan Wake, and Cloud Strife.  Whatever type of Caucasian male you like (assuming you like playing as a Caucasian male) is there for you somewhere.  Go hog wild.

Individuals often express this process of comparison and criticism in relation to an individual's expectations of normativity and how a character should relate to the individual's normative standards.  The individual does not judge the validity of the character primarily on its representation as a human being (i.e. simply as a realized, believable character), but on its representation of the marginalized classes people associate with it.  Of course, this is an impossible standard for any character to meet: despite normativity being established through social interaction, the standards are still understood and judged by individuals.

Though this process happens with minority groups in real-life professions constantly (e.g. female firefighters, Muslim American politicians), audiences often don't see their expectations of characters meeting normative standards as critically flawed because characters are fictitious, the products of one or more writers and the actors who portray them.  Audiences believe that it is not only possible, but an admirable goal for writers to meet their particular normative standards.

This brings me to my own experience with normative audience expectations of a character in a marginalized group: Arcade Gannon.  Arcade is a companion I wrote for Fallout: New Vegas.  In addition to being a Caucasian male, a doctor, and a swell guy, Arcade is also gay.  Though Arcade has no more than five lines out of several hundred that relate to his sexuality (and even those are, at most, strong implications), players have given more attention to his sexuality than any other aspect of his character.  Perhaps the most heated discussions were generated by an article Jim Sterling wrote titled Homosexuality and Fallout: New Vegas: A gay marriage made in gay Heaven.  At the heart of the debate was Jim's assertion that Arcade was a great gay character because his sexuality is so downplayed, so "unremarkable".  Internet posters far and wide both supported and contested this view, often explicitly stating their preferences for how gay characters should be portrayed.  Like Lara Croft's sex, Arcade Gannon's sexuality dominated the definition and discussion of his character.

The obvious problem is that no character can meet every individual's expectations of how a group should be represented.  Despite this, as long as a group is significantly marginalized among characters in media, whether due to simple omission or active exclusion, audiences will continue to turn rare specimens into exemplars.  So, what should we do?  I think that writers (game or otherwise) are already on the right track, but should continue to do the following:

* Represent marginalized groups when sensible.  Diversity helps broaden the appeal of our media, can add interesting dimensions to thematic exploration, and in some cases may even generate themes that would otherwise go unexplored.
* Consider your audience, but remember that they don't have one voice and they aren't all loud.  We write, broadly, to entertain.  Under that expansive canopy, we direct our efforts toward specific groups.  It's a little dehumanizing to reduce them to demographics, but still, we aren't writing for everyone.  It's our job to be the arbiter of propriety among them.
* Write good characters.  It's important for all characters, but it's especially important for a character drawing inordinate audience attention because she's an Asian lesbian Muslim.  Audiences perceive a character as having depth if the various competing aspects of its personality resonate believably with each other, with the story, and with the themes you're trying to explore.  This also applies in comedy, where a writer's temptation to use minority association as a punchline is often high.
* Understand and accept that we cannot write the Perfect X to meet all fan expectations of X.  The best we can do is continue to broaden the margins of the marginalized, provide enough nuanced X characters that there's no need for any individual to stand in for the whole group.

Though it may be a long time before we see as many female protagonists as male protagonists -- and we may never see a high percentage of gay, black, or transgendered characters -- we can hopefully reach the point where audiences discuss these various descriptors and associations within the context of the story and its themes.  When we get to that point,  audiences will see them as more than just Platonic forms struggling to escape from yesterday's margins.

The Roman Legion: Fact, Fiction, Post-Apocalyptic Fiction in History, The Eagle, Fallout: New Vegas, Long Blog Post Titles

I should probably get to bed but I've wanted to write something about our (very) old friends the Roman Legion. I wasn't a student of classic history and, outside of taking a bit of Latin, I never had a huge amount of direct exposure to the subject.  Most of my knowledge about "the" Roman Empire came through studying their (violent) contact with the rest of the world.  For example, Roman Britain.  The revolt of the Iceni under Boudica, the concurrent attack on Mona, and the (unrelated) disappearance of the 9th Legion from York were my favorite episodes.

I'M GOING TO SPOIL SOME PARTS OF THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, THE EAGLE, BELOW.

When I heard that the new film The Eagle was being made, I was excited.  The disappearance of the 9th Legion aka Legio IX Hispana is a cool subject.  I saw the movie and thought it was... okay.  I think one of the problems is that the Roman Legion isn't portrayed as being particularly great for the Britons and the Britons are portrayed as being ... well, not anything.  They don't seem to have much character outside of really disliking Romans and having some cool Scottish Deerhounds.  Considering the gravitas (yeah I went there) given to retrieving the eagle, the importance of Rome isn't built up that much outside of the main character regularly suggesting, "The eagle... is everything... that is... Rome!" with varying tones of profundity.

When they manage to bring the eagle back, it's a moment of triumph, but who cares?  There's never a time where you can go, "Yeah, I guess this aspect of Roman Britain is really cool and the Britons sure are dumb/bad, so this is a Good Thing(tm)."  Not that I'm advocating such a Braveheart-y portrayal, but if you're going to end on a high note, you have to build to it.

Alternately, Roman Britain could have been portrayed as being a mixed bag of things that were occasionally good for the Britons but almost always oppressively terrible, with the Britons being portrayed as an oppressed people who also regularly did horrible things to each other in spite of having a common enemy.  Because that's pretty much what Roman Britain was: Roman legions stomping on local faces and building some roads while Britons occasionally caused the Romans some grief when they weren't busy killing and/or selling each other out.  The hero could have reached this same conclusion, retrieved the eagle, and decided that the only important thing it symbolized was the character of his father during his final moments.  There would be no triumphant, celebratory return of the eagle to Roman politicians, just a son coming to terms with the legacy of his father and his own place in the world.  That's how I would have ended it, mostly because I think that the world and most of our societies have been differing dark shades of awful, so I find it hard to celebrate any of them.

On a related note, a lot of folks have asked me about the Legion in Fallout: New Vegas and why they aren't more fully fleshed out.  The real answer is "time", and I would have liked to have more locations, characters, and quests for the Legion.  Even so, the Legion was always intended to be a faction that was initially presented as terrible, much like the NCR is initially presented as heroic, with revelations over the course of the story causing you to question that initial impression in a larger context.  Caesar shows a very warped plan for how the Legion can bring order to the Mojave, and there are suggestions that regions under Legion control do enjoy a sort of "Pax Romana", but there isn't enough concrete evidence for the player to directly witness to really sell it.  Even so, under the most ideal of portrayals, it was never my intention for the Legion to become a heroic faction.  Their methods and approach would have always been unflinchingly brutal, with proven results and a clear plan to reproduce that success being the only potentially redeeming qualities of the group.